A significant problem in packaging materials, particularly in boxes, exists in both sealing the box or carton and unsealing it. To seal a carton or box securely, various types of tape are typically used, and a cutting tool is generally required to cut the sealing tape and open the container.
Knives or scissors, which are often used in opening packages, present the problem of accidentally causing injury by cutting the person opening the package. Also, damage to the goods contained in the carton by the cutting instrument can present a major concern.
In the existing art, tape used to aid opening of containers includes, for example, the ancient patents to Roden, U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,032,026 and 1,180,541, which provide a taping scheme to seal cans or containers. This early tape provided a string under an adhesive tape with an end extending outwardly from the end of the tape to pull and attempt to sever the tape. A significant problem with this arrangement of tape and string is the inability to correctly place the string relative to the tape so that pulling the string will actually sever the tape. Further, problems with preventing dirt on the adhesive side of the tape and loss of adhesiveness of the tape using such a string often occurred.
The attempt of U.S. Pat. No. 2,771,385 to avoid these latter problems by adhering the string to the adhesive side of the tape further suffered from problems of aligning the string onto the adhesive tape so that the tape would be severed. These types of problems have prevented this type of adhesive tape from being readily usable in the packaging industry. A particular problem with all of these prior schemes resulted from the attempt to form the adhesive tape with the string independently of the application of the tape to sealing boxes.
As such, tape dispensers were developed without consideration of a mechanism to sever such tapes during opening of cartons. For example, U. S. Pat. Nos. 3,813,275; 5,326,421; and 5,350,099 were developed as types of tape dispensers, but none of these utilized, or could utilize, the type of tape described above. Each of these prior devices involved a tape dispenser of a hand-held type for applying tape to a package. However, none are directed to the application of a tape having a mechanism for severing the tape after its application to facilitate opening of a container.
Several prior patents are directed to tape dispensers where a backing tape is drawn from a strip of adhesive tape. These types of tapes, which are designed to prevent the adhesive tape from loosing its stickiness, include those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,151,039 and 5,456,792. However, none of these prior arrangements provide any direction for applying tape to a closure surface of a container with a mechanism to apply or seal the tape from that surface in such a manner that the tape may be severed or unsealed without the use of a cutting tool.
Other problems also are unaddressed by the existing art for taping. For example, the tape user may wish to contain a package or other container within a reusable overpack container--a container that contains another container--by a severable tape layer that provides a mechanism for opening the overpack container without rupturing the inner package. No reusable uses of this type of tape for this purpose have been addressed by the existing art.